Stack-buffer based STL allocator?

Question

I was wondering if it practicable to have an C++ standard library compliant allocator that uses a (fixed sized) buffer that lives on the stack.

Somehow,

Answer 1

This is actually an extremely useful practice and used in performant development, such as games, quite a bit. To embed memory inline on the stack or within the allocation of a class structure can be critical for speed and or management of the container.

To answer your question, it comes down to the implementation of the stl container. If the container not only instantiates but also keeps reference to your allocator as a member then you are good to go to create a fixed heap, I've found this to not always be the case as it is not part of the spec. Otherwise it becomes problematic. One solution can be to wrap the container, vector, list, etc, with another class who contains the storage. Then you can use an allocator to draw from that. This could require a lot of template magickery (tm).